Splitwise alternative that also plans the event — Brunchie vs Splitwise

If your group chat looks like this — a Splitwise link, a scheduling poll in one app, an invite in another, and forty unread messages arguing about all three — you already know what's wrong. Splitwise handles the math. It doesn't handle the event. Someone still has to run the invite, the RSVP, the "where are we staying," and the photos in three other apps, by hand, forever.

Brunchie is the alternative that puts the money inside the plan. Same expense-split-and-settle-up math you already trust — but attached to the hangout you invited people to, voted on, and are actually going to show up for. Our expense splitting guide walks the feature in full; this page is the honest side-by-side for the specific decision — Splitwise vs. an app that also plans the thing you're splitting costs for.

What Brunchie does that Splitwise doesn't

It's not just a ledger — it's the whole hangout. Splitwise's home screen is a list of groups and balances. Brunchie's home screen is a hangout: guest list, RSVPs, itinerary, polls, a shared photo feed, seating if you need it, and the expense split — all living in the same place, all built by the group together as the plan comes together.

Guests never create a Splitwise account to see what they owe. Splitwise requires every participant to sign up and join a group before they can log or see an expense. Brunchie's guests RSVP and view the split from the same invite link — no app download, no account wall, no "wait, what's your Splitwise username again."

The plan and the money stay in sync automatically. Add someone to the hangout and they're on the guest list, the itinerary, and the expense split in one move — not three separate add-a-person flows across three separate apps.

Free for hosts, guests never pay. Core planning and expense splitting are free and uncapped, per the Free forever page. No per-seat pricing, no upgrade wall between you and the rest of your own trip.

Why we don't try to out-Splitwise Splitwise on their strength

Because Splitwise is genuinely good at the one thing it does. Recurring-roommate bill splitting, an ongoing tab with the same three people, multi-currency balances that carry across months — that's their whole product, and they've had years to sand the rough edges off it. We're not chasing that.

What we're chasing: the group that's planning an actual event — a trip, a dinner series, a weekend away — where the expense split is one piece of a bigger coordination problem, not the whole problem. If money is the only thing your group needs to track, honestly, stay on Splitwise. If money is one part of a plan that also needs an invite, an RSVP, a "which weekend works," and somewhere for the photos to land afterward — that's the gap Brunchie fills.

So what — the four things you're actually trying to do

Take a real scenario: a friend group's annual cabin weekend. Six to ten people, a rotating cast each year, a rental that's sometimes just across the border. Here's what "Splitwise + group chat + a poll app + an invite app" looks like folded into one hangout, together.

Decide

Before you book anything, the group has to agree on a weekend and a cabin. Post a poll inside the hangout — pick the "Travel" template, add your candidate weekends as the options, and let everyone vote. Once the group's landed on a weekend, set that as the hangout's date — no separate scheduling link, no screenshotting the poll results into the group chat to make it official.

Coordinate

Once the weekend's locked, share one invite link in the group chat you already have — Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, wherever your crew lives. Guests RSVP without creating an account; they just tap the link and answer. The itinerary lives in the same hangout — check-in time, who's driving, the trail you're doing Saturday — so "what time are we leaving" stops being a message that gets buried under twelve stickers.

Spend

This is the direct head-to-head. Log the cabin deposit, the groceries, the gas, the firewood run — same as you'd log it in Splitwise, amount and who paid. If this year's cabin happens to be across the border, log that expense in the local currency and Brunchie converts it for the settle-up, the same multi-currency handling Splitwise offers. The difference is where it lives: these expenses are already attached to the hangout everyone RSVP'd to, so there's no "which Splitwise group was this trip again" hunt three months later when you're setting up next year's. When it's time to settle, open the settle-up view — everyone's preferred payment details are already there, so nobody's DMing "what's your Venmo" into the void.

Remember

The weekend happens. The photos from Saturday's hike, the video of Marcus falling off the dock, the voice memo somebody left at 1am — they land in the hangout's shared album, the same place the RSVP and the expense split lived all weekend. Next year, when you're deciding on a poll for the new dates, the old album's still sitting right there in the hangout's history for reference. Nothing to dig up in three different apps.

Personal notes from the founder

We ran this exact cabin weekend for years before we built Brunchie — Splitwise for the money, a group chat for "who's coming," a separate poll app for the dates, and somebody's phone album that half the group never got added to. The math was never the hard part. The hard part was that the math lived somewhere completely disconnected from the plan it was for. That disconnect is the actual thing we set out to fix.

We still think Splitwise is a well-built app for what it does — we're not knocking their execution, we're saying most groups don't just need a ledger, they need the ledger attached to the thing it's for. If you've got a group that's outgrown "just split the bill" and started needing the invite-poll-itinerary-photos stack too, that's the exact edge case we built this for — tell us what's still missing and we'll go build it.

TL;DR — switching from Splitwise

If splitting the bill is genuinely the only thing your group needs, Splitwise still does that well. If the money is one part of an actual plan — a weekend, a trip, a recurring dinner crew — set up the hangout on Brunchie and let the expense split live where the rest of the plan already does. For the full walkthrough of logging, splitting, and settling up, see how expense splitting works in Brunchie.